We Need Leaders Who’ll Admit They Were Wrong

Shortly after the fall of Vicksburg to Union forces on July 4, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to his victorious general, Ulysses S. Grant.  Lincoln had been frustrated with many of his military commanders and he thought Grant had made a mistake in his plan of attack on the city. Yet in his letter he admitted that he, Lincoln, was the one who made a mistake:  “when you turned Northward East of the Big Black [River], I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”  Grant’s maneuver was pivotal in forcing Confederate forces to retreat west of the river toward Vicksburg, where they were surrounded in a siege that led to victory. 

Lincoln’s humility and acknowledgment of his mistakes, not just in private but in public, were traits that helped save the republic.  He famously acknowledged his own culpability for the sin of slavery when in his Second Inaugural Address he accepted that “American slavery” led the Almighty to give “both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”

Over the course of American history, it’s rare for national leaders to admit mistakes.  Having reached the pinnacle of power, admitting mistakes in their minds seems a sure-fire way to fall off that peak by encouraging the sharks of criticism to attack. To avoid that result is an all-too-frequent leadership response with a mixture of varying amounts of denial, cover-up, defense, rationalization or doubling-down. 

Yet as Lincoln realized, by admitting mistakes leaders open the door to learning and future success. They also encourage followers to acknowledge their own mistakes.  Leaders also thus gain respect for fostering an environment where learning is valued instead of being a leader focused on fixing blame and administering punishment.  President John F. Kennedy demonstrated this after the very public and humiliating failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion designed to topple Fidel Castro’s Cuban government in early 1961.  Speaking to the nation on April 21 of that year Kennedy took personal responsibility: “There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I'm the responsible officer of the Government."  Kennedy then launched a major effort to understand his mistakes.

In both Lincoln and Kennedy’s cases, acknowledging mistakes was healthy for the country.  Lincoln moved on to re-unite the nation, offering “malice toward none, with charity for all” to the defeated South and Kennedy used the lessons from the Bay of Pigs in his successful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis the next year. 

Contrast this with President Nixon on September 8, 1974, the day he was pardoned.  He issued a statement that accepted no personal responsibility for obstruction of justice in covering up the Watergate break-in.  He distanced himself by saying only “that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.”  Confidence in the national government faltered.  The failure of Presidents Nixon and Johnson to acknowledge mistakes in the Vietnam War when their internal reports told them it was unwinnable resulted in a further loss in trust in the national government, a loss that still haunts America.

“Failure is not an option,” the line attributed to NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz in the film Apollo 13, is a classically American bit of optimism and bravado in that film’s successful effort to bring back the crew of their damaged spacecraft.  Unfortunately, admitting failure is viewed as “not an option” in the lives of most public leaders.

Government leaders are not alone in refusing to acknowledge mistakes.  A settlement reached recently by the Department of Justice with Boeing requires Boeing to pay fines of nearly $1 billion and plead guilty to a felony charge of “conspiring to defraud the federal government” over two fatal crashes of the 737 Max in 2018 and 2019. Yet the settlement requires no public acknowledgement of wrong-doing, no criminal charges against any Boeing executive and no public apology. Such settlements have become commonplace along with the prevalence of non-disclosure agreements by which private sector mistakes are hidden and require no admission of guilt, all in exchange for a financial settlement. The loss of trust in private sector executives is one consequence of such behavior.

We raise children to admit mistakes, apologize and learn from the experience.  What is healthy for building their character would also be healthy for strengthening faith in our democracy as well. Just as supportive parenting is essential to raising good kids, a supportive society is essential for making leaders willing to admit mistakes. We need not excuse illegal or un-Constitutional behavior, but we need a different response for leaders willing to admit other lapses.    

Asking Americans to change their approach to leaders who admit mistakes is a hard sell in a society that thrives on negative news and criticism, but if we want leaders to be more honest with us, we must not punish truth-telling.

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Photo Credit: Grant at Vicksburg, commons.wikimedia.org